Making a Living - by Rosalie Moffett (Paperback)

About the Book

"A brilliant, lithe collection making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares"--

Book Synopsis

"These are poems--generative, alert, and complex--that make good on the promise of the book's smart and fitting title." --Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.

Consumerism--its privations and raptures--seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. "Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?" probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn't just about the trappings of materialism--it's also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.

Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away--on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism's threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett's poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

Review Quotes

Praise for Making a Living

"Rosalie Moffett's wry new collection, Making a Living, attends closely to the economy in which our lives take place."--Washington Post

"Making a Living wonders gorgeously about the crossings of parenting and consumerism: how the making of a life resists materialism, but how much the role requires making a living."--Poetry Northwest

"What else might 'late capitalism' refer to? these poems make me wonder. Could it mean capitalism carries the seed of some providential rebirth, or that it's stuck in traffic on the interstate? Candid and intimate as the secret language of our search histories, and with an imagination that makes majesty of 'the small architecture / in the dishwasher [we] attend to, ' the poems in Rosalie Moffett's luminous new collection, Making a Living, electrify our most mundane reflections with a joy that 'seems always to fashion another longing.' Hold your ear to these poems to hear their iambic brain-beat; feel the kick of a future no algorithm could fathom."--Gregory Pardlo, author of Spectral Evidence

"Rosalie Moffett's poems, lucid and multi-textured, progress with a slyness that is also deeply sad. 'Everyone is still alive, ' one poem informs us, and then qualifies it: 'Everyone, within reason.' Making a Living astutely explicates crisis--economic, bodily--and interrogates the contemporary moment with sharpness of metaphor and keenness of observation. These are poems--generative, alert, and complex--that make good on the promise of the book's smart and fitting title." --Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

"Rosalie Moffett's poetry has always concerned itself with 'systems, ' the forces by which seemingly disparate elements interconnect, move, depend upon, and change one another in inextricable ways--in bodies, in families, in culture, in the natural world. Making a Living explores, with Moffett's exquisite, perspicacious attentiveness and pop-cultural savvy, the ways in which even one of the most intimate human experiences--a rocky path to conceiving a child--is inseparable from the economies of consumerism, debt, marketing, and invisible sources of power. Language, finally, is what binds the speaker's travail and joy in the midst of larger, entangling systems (the 'mort' in 'mortgage, ' for example, or the exorbitant cost of a Tylenol in the birthing clinic). Moffett offers up her 'little towers / of words' as a kind of talismanic orison despite her lack of naivete. '[T]oo late, ' she writes in 'Word, ' 'I recalled, I do not pray.'"--Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

Praise for Nervous System

"Moffett creates order out of the chaos in this radiant collection, cataloging the known and unknown into a coherent story for both the reader and herself."--Publisher's Weekly

"A spider, a snail, a biologist mother, and her daughter walk into a poem. The mother suffers a brain injury in which language goes missing. The daughter spins metaphors into allegories (drawn from the entomological and etymological alike) to release memory into the tongue her mother taught her to live by: 'I wasn't allowed to retain a childish lexicon.' Epistemology dances with ontology. Pleasure, beauty, and the unassailable 'who am I?' transform this astonishing elegy into a symphony played on silky strings: 'the past is what gets flooded from you / when blood comes / between the spider mother and the mother // that lasts.' A book of heartbreaking delight and enthralling consciousness, Nervous System is an aesthetic rarity that places natural science at the service of being--through this book we are again whole with the world."--Fady Joudah, author of [...]

"To see a spider bring forth--from the manifold mysteries of her interior--a single tensile strand is a minor miracle. To see her weave these strands into a geometry as functional as it is elegant is to feel another level of admiration--for the fusion of instinct and intellect, of art and necessity. Rosalie Moffett's poems share this visceral tug and this dexterous virtuosity--'[w]hatever the world offers in the way / of sustenance snares // in those careful lines.' She links together family and injury and biology and geography and destiny and dailiness into a causal geometry of breakages as heartbreaking as it is exquisite."--Monica Youn, author of From From

"Rosalie Moffett's Nervous System is a pellucid, intricate beautiful book-length meditation on the contingencies of human attachment. A masterful and luminous book."--Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out

About the Author

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, which won the National Poetry Series Prize and was listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She lives in Evansville, Indiana, where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.